I understand and even share a little bit of your sentiment, but I'm tired of stretched "X is now not what X was supposed to be".

Strictly speaking, the Internet was supposed to help some servers survive and continue working together despite some others being destroyed by a nuke. That is more-or-less the case today: we see how people use VPNs to route around censorship. Whether you were supposed to stream TikTok videos directly from the phones of their authors or through a centralized data hose - i'm not sure that was ever the grand idea.

Also "decentralized" and "monetize" don't go well together because innovation is stimulated by profit margins and rent-free decentralized solutions by definition have those margins equal to zero (otherwise the solution is not decentralized enough).